Requiem for a Childhood Lost
by KnightNight7203
Summary: "Bev has her life now, and she has her facts. But when she thinks about what the forgetting means, she's overwhelmed by the terror of feeling that she's lost herself somewhere along the way." In which Beverly gets into fashion the same way she gets into most other things in her life—by accident, exactly when she needs to, and full steam ahead.
1. Chapter 1

**I've been working on some R+E stuff, as one does, but took a break to write this giant love letter to my favorite chronically under-developed girl. Bev Marsh deserves the world.**

* * *

Beverly forgets in ebbs and waves, finally settling with a list of simple facts she can rattle off when asked and the strange billowing emptiness that swells to fill the space behind them.

1\. She was born in Derry, Maine. She doesn't live there any more.

2\. In the beginning she had no friends, and then suddenly she did. Here in Portland, she's returned to having no friends once more.

3\. There's a thick scar in the middle of her palm, ropy and pale. She got it playing around with broken glass in the tall grass by a quarry. Yes, it was deep—both the water and the wound. No, it doesn't hurt anymore.

4\. Her father was a lonely widower, grief-stricken and stern. Now he is in jail, and he will stay there, with a little luck, for many years to come. Sorry, she doesn't like to talk about why.

These words, they describe her. A girl was born, she lived, she was loved a little, and she was left behind. The story is perfectly complete on the outside, a donut without a hole, a puzzle with all the pieces. But somehow, there's no emotion behind any of it. No pull of gravity. No _identity_.

Beverly Jean Marsh is sixteen years old and a junior in high school, she likes bright colors and painfully loud music and soft poetry and pistachios, but whoever she was _before_ is almost completely obscured by this all-encompassing fog.

_Derry, Maine._

_Forgotten friends._

_Broken glass._

_Father, jail._

It's a sad collection of hollow notes that never quite comes together to form a song. Sometimes she thinks that, even if she wasn't naturally predisposed to feeling a little bit emo, she would have ended up here eventually by virtue of the holes in her childhood and the clouds they cast over her soul.

_Derry, Maine._

_Forgotten friends._

_Broken glass._

_Father, jail._

Her list echoes so well because it exists in the kind of place where echoes can thrive: a dark, vacant cavern with nothing around to catch the sound before it makes its way back to her.

The last thing on the list bounces back more frequently than the others, perhaps because it's a popular topic of conversation at home with her aunt. Well, it's not popular, exactly—no one enjoys it when it comes up. Dori Benson mentions her brother-in-law with a steely look in her eyes and a tight pinch at the corners of her mouth, enough barely-restrained fire simmering in her voice to match the spirit of the deep red of her hair (Bev gets this particular trait from her).

Actually, Bev thinks Dori should try to limit the subject, what with how angry it seems to make her and all—she's been watching her blood pressure, more so since she accidentally inherited a whole-ass teenager at this stage of her life. Bev knows she isn't exactly the easiest person to get along with all the time—particularly when Dori tries to make her talk about things she doesn't like to talk about. And yet, it's like the woman feels an obligation to test the waters on this murky shore, carefully monitoring Bev's expression and tone and the taut whiteness of her knuckles every time she breaches the subject.

"Don't worry about your father," Dori will say, when there's a five-second silence, or Bev happens to stare into space; several nights a week before bed, or while she censors the newspapers for things that might upset her niece. "He's far away now."

"We never liked the man," she'll toss out when Bev asks an innocent question about a great-aunt on her mother's side, or a Christmas dinner from when she was young, or who the baby at Thanksgiving belongs to. "When your mother brought him home—well, you should have heard what Carol said about the way he treated the waiters at the little diner on the corner."

Sometimes, she'll even add something really serious, like, "I wish I had gotten you out of there earlier, when we lost Elfrieda. It's the biggest regret of my life."

These things Bev can usually deal with. It's kind of nice, honestly, to have an adult worrying about her in a wholesome way, and clearly processing something that's been bothering Dori as well. That's good—she doesn't want her aunt to feel guilty about anything. She doesn't want to cause her aunt any more sadness or inconvenience or frustration than she already has, not ever again. She can react around the holes, she can use context clues, and then she can go back to pretending she spawned at thirteen in the back seat of a pickup truck outside the McDonalds off the I-95, where she woke up in the dark under a scratchy grey blanket after leaving Derry for good. Her origin story. It's a good one, not because it's particularly captivating (it's not—it's _mundane_), but because of how it makes her feel.

_Free_.

Only, sometimes Dori will say this, too: "Do you want to talk to someone? A therapist, maybe?"

On these instances, Bev quickly shakes her head. "I wouldn't know what to say," she whispers. Dori nods sympathetically, and Bev forces a smile. But inside, she's panicking.

Here's the thing: a therapist can't help her with things she's unable to remember. Things she maybe doesn't even want to remember. She's working with what she's got, she's forging a life for herself on her own terms, and she doesn't want some stranger mucking it up with their firm hands on her wrists and their clunky Ph.D. rooting around in the sensitive gray matter of her brain.

Bev has her life now, and she has her facts. But when she thinks about what this means, she's overwhelmed by the terror of feeling that she's lost herself somewhere along the way.

Did she give the old Beverly up? Kill her herself? Is there loss there, or some kind of profound hatred? She thinks about the crack in her aunt's windshield that spiderwebbed during one of their monthly drives out to the coast—when the guys at the shop had tried to fill the little hole at the center, the entire thing had shattered and fallen in.

Still, memory is a strange thing, she's found. It's not always consistent. In fact, Bev has developed a bit of a theory about that: in a person's head—in her head, at least—there are two doors to every memory. One, you can open when you're awake. And the other, you can only access when you're sleeping. Sometimes they're the same. Sometimes, one is straightforward where the other twists and turns. Sometimes, one is clear and one is distorted. But there are always two.

There's something wrong with Beverly's Awake Door—there has been for some time. She knows her mother's face from the pictures on Dori's mantel, but she couldn't summon more than a hazy image of her old friends if someone held a gun to her head. If she strains, she can sketch in the edges of some of them—clear blue eyes, an oversized sweatshirt, thick glasses, tube socks. Blurry figures speeding on rusty bikes across the pavement in the glow of the streetlights, until they're out of sight and the memory fades with them.

That's it. There's nothing else there.

Sometimes, though—late at night—the Asleep Door opens. Her evidence of this is damning: her nightmares.

Beverly can't remember ever dreaming about sunshine and roses. She's pretty sure she wet the bed much later than a typical child should have, and she woke up crying for her mother for months and months after she died. She's always slept in a thin nightgown or tank top with blankets piled around her, so she can add and subtract layers depending on how much she shivers or sweats. But she can't imagine, even in the years that are mostly missing from her mind now, that she was ever faced with quite so much death and destruction and _terror_.

The real problem with having a terrible memory is this: when you have nightmares, it's harder to convince yourself that something you can't remember isn't real.

Tonight is a bad night—just like it had been a bad day before she even flicked off the light and drifted off into an uneasy slumber. In the hours between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m., the following things happened: she forgot her lunch and didn't have money to buy anything, which ended up not mattering anyway because her stomach was just about killing her and she felt a migraine coming on. She never got around to finishing a writing assignment for English, about a shitty old book she hasn't even bothered to read called _Lolita_. She literally fell asleep on the floor in gym after she got out in dodgeball, at least until she got whipped in the face with the ball by the biggest kid in her class.

She missed the bus on the way home. It started raining. Then a car drove through a puddle right beside the sidewalk, splattering her favorite jean jacket with wet, oozing flecks of dark mud.

She fell asleep well before her aunt got home from work—freshly showered, without even thinking about dinner or homework—just to escape it all.

And now, someone she doesn't know is dying and there's blood everywhere, and someone else is screaming, and maybe it's her, but she doesn't actually know what she looks like right this moment and so she can't be sure.

When she wakes, she finds tears in her eyes and the first drops of blood in her panties, and she knows it's going to be a fucking terrible week.

_I wish it had just killed me_, she thinks half-seriously, rummaging around in the closet for a tampon while her underwear soak in the sink and her aunt shouts up the stairs about stir fry and _Jeopardy_. But she doesn't even remember what it is.

Sometimes, she doesn't think she wants to.

* * *

**Do we know Bev's aunt's name? I personally think Dorinda goes well with Elfrieda, that was my logic there.**


	2. Chapter 2

There were three guns that Beverly's father kept in the apartment, and she knew where each one of them was. Sometimes she ran through them like a checklist. It was a little like an adventurous survival game—if she counted them, spied them nestled in their resting places, she knew all was as it should be and that everyone was safe.

Sometimes she wished her father didn't have any guns—for some reason she couldn't quite put her finger on, or perhaps didn't want to, a feeling deep in her gut told her this was the perfect storm for a lurking, unilluminated _something_ to go terribly wrong. But this was Derry. Every grown-up she knew had guns—Chief Bowers, Principal McGuffrey, Mr. Keene—and Alvin Marsh did too.

Three of them. One, two, three.

The hunting rifle, he kept propped in the hall closet just inside the front door. He didn't actually hunt—his back and knees weren't too good, thanks to all the heavy buckets he had to lug back and forth all day as a janitor—but it had been his father's before him and Beverly assumed, though he never spoke about it, that it had sentimental value. It didn't look like anything special—the metal was red with rust and the stock was scarred and dull—but when she brushed her hand down the side, she could feel the family history of it. Decades of fingerprints, seared into the rough wood surface thanks to oil and grease and chilly autumn rain.

She knew this gun wasn't loaded—the barrel was so corroded that you could barely see down it to the other end anyway. Still, she liked to check on it regardless. If her father came around the corner unexpectedly, she could always say that she was going for the vacuum or getting something from the pocket of her coat.

He'd believe that. He wasn't yet so convinced that everything she said to him was a lie.

The second gun was even older and rustier than the first, and it was only this one that Bev sometimes thought of as beautiful. It was an antique, a revolver from the turn of the century. Her father had ammo for this one—he kept it in a little box beside the gun in the second drawer down in the kitchen, and sometimes let her turn the bullets over in her hands, feeling the weight of them—but it still wasn't too scary, because it could only get off a few shots at a time. It made her think of the founding fathers, or maybe of Bonnie and Clyde. This was a weapon, not for angry old men, but for heroes and pioneers.

The real gun—the one that Alvin liked to hold and polish, even if he had never shot it as far as she could tell—he kept in a shoebox under his bed. It was a '76 Beretta—he'd bought it new, just a few weeks after she was born. When he first showed it to her, after he'd stormed off from an argument and she'd scrambled to beg for forgiveness, that's what he'd said: "Bevvy, this gun is exactly as old as you are. Isn't that something?"

The only thing was, he never said _why_ he bought it. To protect her? Bev knew that most people didn't celebrate the miracle of new life with deadly firearms that could take it just as fast.

This one was the hardest for her to put eyes on, because she wasn't supposed to go in his room without him right beside her, and also because she didn't want to. The space was a strange cross between a hoarder's nest and a shrine to her dead mother, dim lights and musty smells and bedding that hadn't been changed in several years at least. His sheets were gray and stained, and looked like the kind of place where terrible, unspeakable things might happen.

But this was the gun that was cleaned and loaded, the gun that he could reach for first, and so sometimes, when her father was out, she couldn't stop herself from having a curious look.

Step one: Listen for the front door to shut. Stay in your room for fifteen or twenty minutes, to make sure he's really gone.

Step two: Look out the window. Identify any movements, all passers-by.

Step three: Push open his bedroom door. Slip inside. Close it—but don't latch it—behind you.

Step four: Lift the oily bedskirt, just enough to lift the lid on the box.

Step five: Inspect the gun.

Step six: Retreat.

She pulled it off flawlessly, like a dance. In one moment, out the next, the final phase of the game, the ritual that helped her sleep at night. That was, at least, until the day she heard heavy footsteps in the hallway behind her. She let the bedskirt drop, fell heavily back on her tailbone, tried to steady her breathing.

_The guiltier you look, the guiltier you are._

The door creaked open, and she was met with a silent stare. She sat on her hands, shoulders hunched, and waited.

"What are you doing in here, Bevvy?" her father asked finally. His voice was slow and deep in the back of his throat, practically choking out in his effort to appear calm. His face, when she dared to look at it, was eerily blank. Immediately she clocked an explosion brewing: he was the gasoline, more than enough of it to sear flesh and melt bone, and she was holding the match.

_Carefully, carefully._

Unfortunately, he was well-practiced in the art of throwing himself at the match so she didn't have to do a damn thing.

"What are you doing down there, under the bed?"

Bev thought of all the things she couldn't say: _Oh, I'm just looking at your gun. I want to make sure you aren't carrying your gun. I want to make sure you haven't moved your gun_. She thought of these things, she thought of what his response might be, and she reached under the bed and yanked out what she decided in a flash of clarity would be her best possible alibi.

Her mother's sewing kit.

"Nothing, Daddy," she said in her most soothing voice. _You're not guilty._ "I was just looking for this."

Alvin blinked at the wicker basket, nearly overflowing with sun-faded pincushions and fraying spools of thread. He reached out, as if he was going to touch it, to take it from her. But halfway there he stopped, squinting at Beverly, at the basket, as if he couldn't quite figure the two of them out.

"Your mother loved to sew," he said after a long moment of silence, and he finally swallowed down the last of his rage. Bev knew in that moment that she was in the clear. "She never had much time, she got home from the restaurant so late, but she was always so creative with the patterns." He paused, scratched the back of his head. "I never realized you had an interest in that."

And here's the thing: she didn't.

She wore dresses because her father said it was better to hide the shape of her thighs, that he would rather pay for something with flowing skirts than pants—but she had already learned to stay away from most really girly things thanks to the other girls in her class. She had just bought her first bra last year, and already the names came so fast and so furious that they were almost unbearable: _slut, skank, whore_. She didn't wear makeup, she pulled back her hair. She only did the dishes out of necessity, because her father refused, and did her best to be seen roller blading and frequenting slasher movies and buying ugly rock tapes, just to prove she was different than what they said. She didn't babysit, and she didn't tutor—she got her money like the irresponsible boys, shoving her hand behind the couch cushions and sucking up on the rare occasions sympathetic relatives came to visit.

So, needless to say, something like _sewing_ was the last thing she wanted to get caught showing interest in.

But of course, the _actual_ last thing she had an interest in was a black eye from being pistol-whipped or, worse, a bullet in her skull. So she set her jaw and hiked the massive basket into her lap and said, "Yup. I lost a button on my shirt today. I was going to put a new one on."

"You know what?" her father said, extending a rough hand to help her up from the ground. His eyes followed her hands down her body as she brushed herself off. Then he picked up the basket at her feet, pressed it into her hands, and guided her toward the door with his fingertips on the small of her back. "You can keep it. Maybe it'll help you be more like your mother in other ways, too."

"Thank you, Daddy," she said, brushing her fingers gently along his cheek, and then she hightailed it to her room. She fell against her door as she closed it, caught in the place between laughing and crying where all you can do is stare blankly at the wall.

The gun was there. Her father didn't suspect anything. And now, to top it all off, she had a sewing kit. Her mother's.

Too bad she didn't have anything she wanted to do with it.


	3. Chapter 3

Here's a great fact Beverly has not managed to forget about her past: she does not make friends easily. She's been in Portland three years now, and while there's a distinct lack of small-minded bullies and she has a number of acquaintances she's willing to compliment on their hair in class or ask about a new CD across the table at lunch, there are no sleepovers on the weekends, no movies during breaks, no notes passed in history or friendship bracelets or secret handshakes or trips to the mall.

Well—she goes on trips to the mall. There's not that much else to do, and she likes to keep busy. It's just that other people don't go _with_ her, and if she sees someone she recognizes there, she tends to turn on her heel and quickly walk the other way.

She's actually at the mall now, pacing back and forth in the second level of Macy's. There's a hanger with a plain t-shirt clasped in one hand so they don't kick her out for loitering. She's got a cigarette between her fingers of her other hand—it isn't lit, because they very much do enforce the _No Smoking_ _Indoors_ policy at this particular shopping center, but it keeps her grounded. She can easily stuff it in her pocket or down her shirt when the tall angry cashier walks her way to re-shelve the watches the flock of businessmen tried on during lunch.

She's thinking about getting an expensive faux-fur coat, so she can walk through the arts district in sunglasses and pretend to be a rich divorcée. She's thinking of getting jeans that are more holes than fabric, held together by ragged seams and a prayer, that she can pair with the new silk she bought at the fabric store last week. She's thinking about dyeing her hair black, about chemically straightening it so it falls in flat sheets around her face, about shaving it off entirely and never having to think about it again.

That's not something she could do in Macy's per se—not unless she goes guerrilla in the bathroom with the penknife she keeps in her bag—but she's sure there's a place around here somewhere. It's brushing her shoulders now. It's to the point where something has to be done.

She finds herself in the bathroom despite the fact that she doesn't remember telling her feet to go there, stuffing the shirt behind the trash can because she doesn't want to get caught with unpaid merchandise where it's not allowed. She looks at herself in the mirror and grimaces at what she sees. That penknife is looking like a better and better idea.

Sometimes, for reasons she can't quite articulate, she fucking hates her hair.

_Dye it black…_

Suddenly she's hit with a memory—a teasing voice, dark, messy hair, lenses so thick they magnified the eyes behind them—

_Richie_, a voice inside her says, and then he's right there before her eyes.

It's almost fall and they're resting at the foot of the Paul Bunyan statue; Richie is drawing something rude on the toe, something with a bunch of dicks. He's wearing shorts because he's an idiot, and a sweater because he loves Eddie too much to pretend he can't feel the cooling temperatures at all.

"So anyway," he's saying, "you dye yours black and I'll bleach mine and then we'll see which one of us gets beat up for it first. Doesn't that sound fun? Also, think of how much power I'd have if I was blonde."

"I have literally no clue what would give you that idea," she says drily. Richie's power, whatever that may be, absolutely does not come from his physical form.

"Bev, you fucking comedian," he cackles. Then he puffs out his chest and flips his hair, except instead of looking suave his glasses slide down a bit on his nose. "With the hair of a Californian surfer and the body of a Greek god, I'd be damn near irresistible. The earth would tremble when I swung my feet out of bed in the morning. Ladies would throw themselves before me."

She cracks up at whatever stupid voice he's doing, and the way he's rolling his eyes back in his head. He probably thinks it looks orgasmic, but she's half convinced the people around them are going to start asking if he's having a seizure.

"Ladies would throw something at you, all right," she snickers. "But it wouldn't be themselves."

"Panties," Richie suggests cheerfully.

"Rocks," Bev says. "Or restraining orders."

"Hmm." Richie falls silent for a rare moment, but she can tell he's still thinking about his idea.

She sees it in his eyes as she looks at him then, this desperate need to be noticed—to make waves—but also to fade into the background of every scenario he can. It's very _Richie_ of him. Or maybe that's just what it means to be a person—needing to stand out, and needing to hide. To reach others, but to protect yourself from them, too.

She can relate to that—maybe even more than she wants to admit.

"Seriously, though. Blonde. Do you think I could pull it off?" Richie pokes at her with his sharpie, and she swats him away—the last thing she needs is for her jeans to get taken over by his dick octopus. "I think Maggie and Went would take it okay—Boobee and Peepoo might need some convincing, though—"

At that, Bev laughs so hard she actually starts to cry. She hasn't cried in ages, and something about it feels really, really good.

"For that last time," she says when she recovers the slightest ability to breathe. "You do not call your grandparents Boobee and Peepoo. No one believes you."

"Ben does," Richie says confidently, and, yeah, that doesn't exactly surprise her at all.

"I don't know if you have the face for blonde hair," she tells him gently, wiping her runny nose with the back of her hand—not to be rude, but because she's suddenly very concerned he'll lose an eye if he tries to do the bleaching himself. Her father cleans with bleach, and she's heard stories. He shrugs.

"You wouldn't actually get beat up for having dark hair, though," he promises. "I was just joking. You've got the Molly Ringwald thing going now, but you could just as easily be Winona Ryder."

Bev has the slightest crush on Winona Ryder, so she doesn't brush this off immediately. Was he right? Would her hair look good a darker color?

"You look like you've seen a ghost," a voice in the bathroom in Portland says, a voice she recognizes. Bev turns and meets the eyes of a girl from school. She shrugs—now she's distracted and the memory is gone. But at least she has a reason not to take out her penknife and go to town.

"I'm a daydreamer," she says, because it's whimsical and today she fancies herself a whimsical person. Then she falls silent, because she doesn't really talk to this girl, and she's not entirely sure how it's going to go.

Her name is Chuck—short for Charlene, Bev thinks, although she has already determined that no one gets away with actually calling her that. She wears tiny tank tops and towering shoes, and calls everyone "my dear" for one of two reasons: she wants to get in their pants or eviscerate them. It's clearly always one or the other with her—there appears to be no in between—and Bev hasn't quite worked out where she falls on this ranking system yet. She's not sure she'd know how to ask.

Today Chuck's shoes have spikes on the heels and her tank top is pink, and her hair is pulled back into a ponytail so tight it's actually tugging her eyebrows up her forehead. This alone leaves Bev feeling a little afraid. But then Chuck beams at her and Bev realizes she smells like strawberries, her favorite fruit, so she decides to stick around and see where this spontaneous bathroom rendezvous will take her.

"We've never really, like, interacted," Chuck says, in a voice that's both sweeter and quieter than Bev might have expected. "But I've always wanted to tell you—I really love your clothes."

Today, Bev is wearing a fraying jumper with an uneven hem and literally the ugliest shirt she owns—she's been on a bit of a downward spiral lately, literally everything else she owns is in the wash—so she suspects this might be a bit of an empty compliment. Still, it makes her smile. "I sew a lot of my outfits myself," she says, because she's still chasing that vibe of whimsy—and because, if she remembers correctly, friendships require sharing things about yourself. She didn't walk into this mall looking to make a friend, but she's not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

"You're absolutely kidding me," Chuck says. "Right?"

Bev shakes her head. "I've been doing it for a few years now," she says. "There's something about making things—about sitting down and focusing on a project that big—that I really like."

She runs out of things to say after that—it's hard to describe the importance of tasks that keep you distracted without getting into some other details she expects might ruin the mood—so she stands there and stares. Chuck stares right back.

"I hate to ask, but do you have a tampon, my dear?" Chuck asks finally. Bev passes her one, because she does, and Chuck disappears into a stall.

When she comes back out and Bev is still standing there, a little zoned out and a little listless, Chuck doesn't look upset or annoyed. In fact, she looks downright delighted.

"Now I just feel like I should pay you back somehow," she says as she washes her hands, and Bev doesn't protest—she might not know a lot, but she knows nobody really feels indebted over a lousy twenty-five cents. There's something else going on here. "How about this—let's go see what you like at my favorite store. I need to buy something for a party next weekend, and I'm dying for your advice."

Without waiting for an answer, she takes Bev's hand—water drips down her fingertips, she never dried them—and tugs her out the door and into the world beyond.


End file.
